This week we publish an essay by Dylan Sherman accompanying Rehearsal Behavior, a screening series co-curated by Andrea Torres and Charlotte Strange, tracing exchanges across generations of artists working between dance and experimental cinema.
—Editors
“The dance = years of work to get to this point—my brain’s dancing, never been so free.”
So writes Guillaume Dustan on Songs in the key of moi, his 2000 autoportrait in which he gets high and films himself in his apartment over the course of a night-into-morning bender. It is one of 19 films the writer shot on a camcorder from 2000 to 2004, which he did not edit and never screened during his lifetime. Zoomed-in body parts of a nude lover make a few appearances, but for the most part it’s just Dustan and his queer world, which he pans over and zooms into in rhythm with the tracks he plays on his turntable. When he happens upon his own image, he’s always dancing.
Dustan’s nocturnal antics make me recall one of my own formative encounters with the medium of dance film, albeit in very different circumstances. As a ballet student and proud balletomane in high school, I often navigated to a shady website just before bedtime to commence glacially slow torrents of performance broadcasts from the Royal Ballet, my favorite company, that would be ready by the time I woke up.
Transmissions of these large-scale productions brought me closer into their choreographed worlds via visually pleasing close-up shots that revealed precise footwork and slow pans that kept star dancers in focus as they traversed the stage. Such carefully planned cinematography reflects dance’s close relationship to film that extends back to the dawn of the medium—Thomas Edison made his short film Annabelle Butterfly Dance in 1894, a year before the Lumière brothers hosted the world’s first film screening. Here, as in the Royal Ballet broadcasts I coveted over a century later, Edison creates a transmittable and commodifiable record of a dance.
On the flip side, there is an emancipatory power to the genre (variously referred to as dance film, dance for camera, and screendance) that emerges when the camera precedes choreography as the occasion for dance. Liberated from the restrictions of a preconceived score, movement unfurls into a series of prosocial moments that reveal not only why we are compelled to dance in the first place, but the wider milieu that undergirds the practice of performance. The relationship between those behind and in front of the camera breaks open the binary between subject and director and moves toward an unstable field where authorship is in constant negotiation.
